From a Whisper to a Scream
by Summoner Luna
Summary: There are places, after time compression, where the pieces don't quite fit. And for Squall and Ellone, there are people who still move in and out of the past. [SquallxRinoa, Ellone, and the gift of the succession.]


The first time it happens it is three weeks past the war and Squall is sitting on the second floor balcony with Rinoa, watching her read, still slightly in awe that she still wants to talk to him. That she hasn't left, that she knows how he feels (at least as much as he knows it, and even then she probably knows more), and she chooses his company, and she is someone whose company he wants to choose as well.

In one moment she is frowning at a piece of her hair that won't stay tucked behind her ear, and the next he is watching from the corner of the cafeteria as a fourteen-year-old Seifer stands over a thirteen-year-old Zell, berating him for going through the line a second time (even though no one follows that rule, not ever). Squall remembers the same annoyance at Seifer and second-hand embarrassment at watching the new student pale under the spotlight, mixed now with shame over how he just sat there and let it happen—then the scene goes blank and when he opens his eyes again Rinoa is crouched beside him, her frown now one of worry, and she strokes his head. Affection is natural to her and it is almost enough to relax him, and he tells her what happened, and that she is worried and confused on his behalf fills him with enough warmth to make the drop into the past a little more bearable.

.

The second time it happens, he sees the orphanage. It is before Ellone left them, and he is sitting quietly at the foot of his bed, listening to her read bedtime stories to a room full of other children; most he recognizes, one or two he does not. Edea—Matron—comes in as Ellone nears the end of the story and stands in the doorway and listens, and when Ellone is finished the two of them say their goodnights, and leave, filling the room with moonlight when they turn off the dim overhead light. It is perfectly normal and Squall would think it was merely a dream, if he didn't wake to six missed calls from three different people, and a frantic string of texts from Rinoa begging him to call her, because it's not like him to skip meetings and nobody can reach him and _please let me know you're alright._

.

After the third time (unfamiliar this time; a few people he's never met walking through what might be Dollet or what might just be another coastal town he has yet to visit), he calls Ellone.

"I'm not doing it," she says, but her voice catches and trails off.

"But?" he asks.

"I'm not doing it…on purpose."

He's the only one she's connecting with, she says, and each occurrence surprises her as much as it surprises him. Laguna doesn't know, and she wants it to stay that way, and he has no problem agreeing.

"I missed a meeting last week, Elle, and Rinoa's already starting to worry. What if this happens when I'm in the field?"

"If it happens again, I'll tell Edea. Promise."

He grunts in acceptance, and they hang up.

It happens again.

.

It is innocuous, for a long time, if not annoying. He misses another meeting he didn't want to attend anyway. Selphie teases him for being so bored by her talk about the Garden Festival that he actually fell asleep. Rinoa enjoys a longer afternoon at the beach than they originally planned, her concern muted by the dreamlike joy he has come to recognize on her when she has uninterrupted time to finish reading a book.

It is a side effect of time compression, they determine, with Edea's consultation. She has been listening for anything out of the ordinary since they returned from their fight with Ultimecia, trying to piece together how many places the pieces don't quite fit.

There is a stretch of land in eastern Centra, two square miles, where the needle on a compass spins and spins, never finding north.

The sun sets in Dollet an hour later than anywhere else in the world.

And now, a brother-sister duo who can move in and out of the past.

"Move implies a measure of control," Squall argues. Ellone sits up straighter in her chair, and Edea quietly sips her tea.

"But move you do," she replies.

Squall and Ellone look to each other, and allow the change in subject when Edea mentions the storm about to move in.

Later, they sleep in their childhood bedroom. Rinoa has been spending more nights with him than not of late, and Squall is surprised at how cold the bed is without her, even after so short a time. There is no reason to comment on this to his sister but the absence is keeping him awake.

"We could go there you know," Ellone says, and Squall wonders briefly if she senses his discomfort or if she is struggling to sleep on her own.

"Dollet?" he asks. "Or eastern Centra?"

"Either. Both. See if it gets worse—or better. I could go one place, you could go the other."

"Mmm."

His mattress is lumpy and smells slightly of mildew, and he misses Rinoa more than he can say, and then he is watching her, and he wishes he weren't. She is five years old and it is raining, and she is staring silently at an array of flashing lights so bright that the after-image stays with Squall hours later, when he finally wakes (when he finally breaks free), and he calls her, middle of the night and poor-signal be damned, and he almost cries over how good it is to hear her voice. He is overwhelmed with guilt. She is Rinoa, nearly eighteen, and she is the little girl who had to watch her mother die in the rain. He is certain she has held him and told him it's okay to be sad, now that he knows who his mother was, now that he knows how she died. Has he ever done the same for her?

The moon has set and Squall stares into the darkness outside the window by his bed and mentally makes his plans to leave Centra as soon as he can in the morning.

.

Ellone does not talk to him about what they see, not when it is his own past, not when it is Rinoa's.

They make plans to go to these other places affected by time compression, and something always gets in the way, and that something is usually Garden. Squall sees three more episodes from Rinoa's past, and bristles when Ellone accuses him of stalling because he has something to gain.

"What can I possibly gain from watching her relationship with _Seifer?_ "

She has a retort on the tip of her tongue but she reigns it in, and Squall remembers, not for the first time, that his sister is older than he is, and her own person, and not just someone he used to cling to in shyness, or the little girl from Laguna's past.

"I have to be in the Talle Mountains for work next week. It's in Eastern Centra."

Ellone is satisfied with his timeline, and underneath the waning fury in her expression he sees fear, and it leaves him powerless.

He says nothing of it, not even to Rinoa, and that night he is drawn into the past, but not by his sister. He is back on the edge of Time, with no control over how he got there or how he can get back, and he is watching Rinoa, Ellone, Quistis, and everyone else he has come to care for sucked in to the aether around him, and he knows he is somehow responsible.

.

It happens again, and he is in the field. He is not injured and neither is anyone else, but he misses the window for his extraction, and he wakes, alone in a copse of trees, to a thick silence and the hope that Ellone will at least tell Rinoa so she doesn't worry when he is reported MIA.

Ellone.

She is in Dollet, just as they planned, and Squall frowns, and looks up at the sky. He has a few hours left of daylight, and instead of the one mile walk from the SeeD safe house near the coast, he has a twelve mile walk, including down the mountain.

And the mountain is the easy part. It's the long walk across the desert that is too familiar, too unending.

Four hours later, he finally reaches the coordinates he mapped on Edea's advice on the edge of dusk, and he does not know if it exhaustion, dehydration, or Ellone's _gift_ that causes the dizziness he feels before collapsing in the sand. Not until he is hit with images he would rather not see, wishes he never had to see. Ellone, watching the beach beside the orphanage recede as a ship carries her away from Squall, from her last connection to her life in Winhill. Ellone, as a child, sitting alone in a white-walled room with her arms roped to a hard plastic chair, staring at cards covered in stains of ink. Ellone, banging her tiny fists against the glass walls of her bedroom in Esthar until they bleed, crying out, for Laguna, for Raine, for _anyone_.

Ellone, grown and in his head, whimpering because she is reliving it as much as he is seeing it happen, and she can't control it, can't _disconnect_ as she called it once, and as her weeping intensifies Squall starts to worry that they are stuck, and that by coming here they have created a triangle of broken time, and what kind of joke would it be if he saved the world from time compression only to set it in motion again?

Her memories move faster, lab after lab, dream after dream, and between the nausea and the anger at watching it all Squall thinks of the one other person he wishes could see it, the person Ellone helped once, the person who might be able to help him make sense of it all—

 _—Rinoa, please—_

—and he is awake, spitting out sand and aching from his trek across the desert, but he is awake.

.

"She says she felt me calling for her."

It is explanation enough for him, for what he knows about his bond with Rinoa, his role as _knight,_ but Ellone frowns over her coffee, and she tightens her fingers around the thin styrofoam cup bearing the graceful logo of the Winhill Inn.

He wants to reach out to her, to hold her as she always did for him when they were small, as he has seen Rinoa, Zell, even Laguna do, but she is _Ellone,_ and he has no idea what he would do if she started to cry, if she wanted to talk in response.

Just when he thinks he has been able to reconcile the sister from his broken memories of the orphanage with the little girl who put jam in Laguna Loire's shoes, he now has to reconcile the woman who helped him save Rinoa, who bullies him when his emotional shortcomings get the best of him, with the tortured and neglected child of their shared visions.

He thinks, just for a moment, that he is ashamed of how closed and difficult he turned out compared to her. He had Garden, to be sure, but she had Odine.

"And Edea," she says, and he must have said his last thought out loud. "And the White SeeD."

Their eyes meet, and Squall flushes. He wants to be stronger, to find a way to solve this riddle. There is something in her that moves him toward protection, something beyond her role as his sister. It is a watered down version of what drives him to protect Rinoa, what sends him to Centra whenever Cid says Edea needs help, what—

 _She says she felt me calling for her, and that's what broke the connection._

"What?" Ellone says, her face skeptical, but her shoulders turned in, anxious, eager for any suggestion he might have.

"I want to try it again."

If she wants to argue she suppresses it, and he tells her his theory, and she nods sadly, as if she has known all along, and just needed someone else to say it out loud.

.

Rinoa is with him this time, and they spend the night in the Centran safe house, and he has never been more grateful for her ability to know what he is thinking without him having to say a word.

 _But she's my sister,_ he thinks, and watches the wind blow sand across the desert under the deep pink sky of sunset. He can't elaborate, and Rinoa does not ask him to, but she answers in her own way, later, when they are laying together, in the comfort of each other's skin.

"I found you when you were dead," she tells him. "And I've seen you cry. Do you love me any less, knowing I've seen you at your most vulnerable?"

He responds by pulling her closer, because the answer is no, never. The answer is that he loves her more, because she has seen pieces of him even he is unfamiliar with and she stays, she _stays,_ and because of her he doesn't have to go through everything alone.

He has more in common with his sister, he thinks, than either of them realized.

.

Like last time, they connect when Squall steps into the range of Centra that has not fully come back to the present, and like last time, the wave of memories is unrelenting. He watches his mother, pale and sweating, reaching for a baby she is too weak to hold. He is on the SeeD ship, caught in a massive storm that claims the lives of several young orphans. He watches Rinoa in the space station, swatting down men twice her size like mosquitos—

—and as quickly as he sees her, he is awake again.

"Put it on," he says, and she nods tearfully and fastens a plain silver band around her wrist—

—and he is asleep, and the images don't stop, until the sound of Ellone's screams are so loud they drown out everything else—

He hears something like the sound of glass shattering, and the world is black and quiet.

.

The hospital is Estharian in design, and the first thought Squall has on waking, is just how common it is for him to wake up in a med bay somewhere. He closes his eyes and listens to the hum of the lights, to the steady beeping of the heart monitor—no, _two_ monitors, and the dry sound of someone turning the page in a book.

He turns his head to talk to Rinoa, but she is curled up in the chair beside him asleep, a bright red welt circling one of her wrists.

Ellone is in a bed on his other side. She lays a book down in her lap when he turns to her, and in the movement he catches a glint of light reflecting off a silver band.

 _"I called to you and it broke the connection,"_ _he tells Rinoa, after the first trip to Centra_. " _And even she has said she doesn't understand her powers. What if she's part of the succession? And when I reached you, it spoke to that part of her and broke the trance?"_

He opens his mouth to speak but his throat is dry, and instead he just nods at the bracelet.

 _"I've never heard her,_ _Rinoa responds,_ " _But I've been…I've been_ junctioned _to her. And if I have been, you have been too."_

 _"So…what if I still am?"_

"You were right," Ellone says, and holds up her arm, and he has never wanted more to be wrong.

* * *

 _Special thanks on this one go to: irishais, for the headcanon about the sunset in Dollet, and siobhane for conversations about Ellone, and the exploration of Ellone's past she went into in her fic Don't Come Closer (shameless rec her-go read that because it's amazing)._

 _I had this idea over a year ago, for a fic where after time compression, Ellone's control over her power is looser, but it only affects Squall. I wanted to write something exploring their relationship post-game. This isn't quite that, but it came back to me really strongly the other night, and since there's no way I can take on another MC right now when I have two already on hiatus, I did what I could with a one-shot. This is complete-if I do revisit this idea and try to expand it, it will be something new, not a continuation of this one._

 _I also want to give some special thanks to Rosa Heartilly, and Narayanfx, who both left surprise reviews for me this week. You two are about 98% responsible for me actually taking the time to sit down and make myself write this weekend, because I was just so darn elated to see your feedback!_


End file.
